When Bill Frist tried to diagnose Terri Schiavo via videotape last year, he was taking a page from the intelligence world’s playbook, a recently declassified 1979 CIA report reveals. The report examines the use of “medical intelligence” in diagnosing the illnesses of foreign leaders without the benefit of a direct examination, a process labeled “remote medical diagnosis.” Such diagnoses are facilitated by face-to-face encounters, but they can also be carried out using photographs, videotape, and even voice analysis (to identify stroke victims). The most useful images, the authors note, are those “obtained in more informal settings, particularly such sporting occasions as golf, hunting, and swimming when attire and postures are more revealing of the subject’s physical condition.”

As an example of a successful remote diagnosis, they cite the case of Leonid Brezhnev: in 1973, an “astute personal observation by a medical analyst” correctly diagnosed the Soviet leader with cardiac arrhythmia (he had a pacemaker installed shortly afterward) and with teeth so rotten that his face drooped and his words slurred. The latter diagnosis, the authors note, enabled the CIA to dismiss later theories that he had cancer of the mouth or had suffered a stroke. They also discuss the successful diagnosis of French President Georges Pompidou, whom CIA analysts observed in the early seventies developing a “characteristically puffy face” possibly indicative of cortisone treatments for multiple myeloma. This analysis was vindicated when Pompidou died from the disease, which he had hidden from the public. However, it’s possible to keep a foreign leader’s ailments secret even from the CIA: when Golda Meir passed away in 1978, aides revealed that she had been suffering from malignant lymphoma for over a decade—and the authors admit that they “had been entirely unaware that she had this lethal disease.”

Not every post-9/11 military intervention has cost us the hearts and minds of the local population, according to a new poll sponsored by the Program on International Policy Attitudes. The poll, based on a random nationwide sample of Afghan adults and carried out late last year, finds that 83 percent of Afghans have either a “very favorable” or “somewhat favorable” impression of the U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, and 70 percent rate the security situation in their region as either “excellent” or “good,” while only 5 percent call it “poor.” Eighty-three percent of respondents said their country was moving in the “right direction,” a similar percentage told pollsters that the toppling of the Taliban was a “good thing” for their country, and 79 percent approved of American military operations against al-Qaeda.

Every commuter has a least-favorite bottleneck, but if you live in Los Angeles you may have quite a few of them, according to a study prepared for the Federal Highway Administration which lists the twenty-four worst bottlenecks in the United States. Five are in Los Angeles, including the worst of all: the intersection of U.S. 101 and I-405, which generates 27,144 hours of delay every year. The worst bottlenecks on the East Coast, meanwhile, are in Atlanta, and just off the dreaded Capital Beltway around Washington, D.C.

In yet another sign of political polarization, Democrats and Republicans can’t even agree on how well the economy is doing. Throughout the 1990s, there was little partisan disagreement on the topic: even during politically fraught periods like the Republican Revolution of 1994 and the impeachment of Bill Clinton, voters on both sides of the political divide held roughly similar views about the health of the American economy. Since George W. Bush’s election in 2000, though, Democrats’ and Republicans’ perceptions of economic matters have steadily diverged, to the point where in a recent Pew poll, 56 percent of Republican respondents rated the state of the economy as either “excellent” or “good,” whereas only 28 percent of independents and 23 percent of Democrats judged that it was doing well. This divide holds true regardless of income: poor, middle-class, and well-off GOP voters were all far more likely than their Democratic and independent counterparts to say that the economy was in “excellent” or “good” shape.

Dick Tracy had it right, a new study suggests: there really is a correlation between ugliness and crime. A pair of economists examined looks and lawbreaking among adults aged eighteen to twenty-six, using a longitudinal study involving interviews with more than 15,000 adolescents and young adults. Controlling for socioeconomic status, the economists found that as a person’s reported attractiveness decreases, the chance of his or her having committed a crime—from selling drugs to burglary—goes up. (Interviewers were asked to rate the attractiveness of each participant on a 1-to-5 scale.) The authors note that their findings may be partially explained by the fact that good-looking people tend to have higher earnings than the unattractive, who therefore have a stronger financial incentive to consider a life of crime. But other factors may be at work: the effect of unattractiveness on crime is particularly strong among women, and the study suggests that this may have to do with “human-capital formation” in high school, where good-looking females tend to have higher GPAs and fewer disciplinary problems than unattractive girls, making them less prone to crime later on in life. The authors also note that attractive women “tend to receive favorable treatment from the criminal-justice system”—that is, even when they break the law, they are less likely to be detained for it.

Students at private schools tend to outscore their public- school counterparts on standardized tests—but are private schools really better at educating their students, or do they just enroll more pupils from socioeconomic backgrounds that foster academic achievement? A new study takes up this question by examining math scores from the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tested more than 28,000 fourth and eighth graders nationwide. As expected, private-school students earned substantially higher math scores on the NAEP tests than did students in public schools—but when the authors controlled for socioeconomic status, the private-school advantage completely disappeared. Indeed, when the authors compared students within socioeconomic brackets, rather than across them, the students from public schools actually outscored their private-school peers, in the fourth and eighth grades alike.

More and more companies are experimenting with word-of-mouth marketing, in which consumers either volunteer or get paid to sing a product’s praises to their friends and neighbors. You might think that these covert marketers’ credibility would diminish if they admitted to being part of an organized campaign—but you’d be wrong, according to a Northeastern University study. Such advertising, the study finds, is more effective when the person spreading the word admits up front to being part of an advertising campaign. None of the metrics of a campaign’s success—from the credibility of the sales pitch to the likelihood that someone would eventually purchase the product in question—was adversely affected when the marketers admitted to being part of a marketing effort, and people were actually more likely to pass the sales pitch along to someone else if they knew that it was part of a campaign. To explain this phenomenon, the study notes that there was “higher conversational quality”—that is, the discussion was both more relaxed and more in-depth—during exchanges where the marketers admitted their affiliations. And the author speculates that telling people they’ve been targeted by a word-of-mouth marketing campaign makes them feel special—as if they’ve been handpicked to receive new or “inside” information.

Climate change may be bad for ice caps, permafrost, and coastal cities, but it could be good news for U.S. agriculture, a study from the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies suggests. Using a long-range climate-change model from Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, the authors project that global warming will lead to increased precipitation and longer growing seasons across the United States over the next century. The resulting productivity gains could effect a 3.4 percent increase in annual profits for U.S. agriculture, or $1.1 billion a year overall. These gains won’t be evenly distributed, however: the states most likely to benefit are Pennsylvania and South Dakota, where the model predicts increased profits of $570 million and $540 million, respectively; the big losers will be Colorado (–$610 million), Oklahoma (–$580 million), and especially California, which stands to lose $2.4 billion a year in agricultural profits if the study’s model proves accurate.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.